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The
Gulag or GULAG was the government
agency that administered the penal labor
camps of the Soviet
Union. The term is infamous for its association
with remote places where prisoners were kept and sometimes
disappeared. The camps housed all types of criminals, but are well
known as mechanisms for repressing political opposition and for
holding political
prisoners.

Gulag is the acronym for The
'Chief Administration of Corrective
Labor Camps and Colonies (
лавноеУ'правление Исправительно-Трудовых
Лагерей и колоний;
Glavnoye Upravlyeniye
Ispravityel'no-Trudovih Lagyeryey i koloniy)
of the NKVD.Eventually, by metonymy, the usage of "Gulag" began generally
denoting the entire penal labor system in the USSR, then any such
penal system.In Russian, Gulag is pronounced: (
, )

There were at least 476 separate camps, some of them comprising
hundreds, even thousands of camp units. The most infamous complexes
were those at arctic or subarctic regions. Today's major
industrial cities of the Russian Arctic such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Magadan,
werecamps originally built by prisoners and run by
ex-prisoners. Anne Applebaum, author
of Gulag: A History,
explains: "It was the branch of the State
Security that operated the penal system of forced labour camps and associated detention and
transit camps and prisons. Though it imprisoned millions, the name
became familiar in the West with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973
The Gulag
Archipelago, which likened the scattered camps to "a chain
of islands."

Brief History

More than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from
1929 to 1953, with a further 6 to 7 million being deported and
exiled to remote areas of the USSR. According to Soviet data, a
total of 1,053,829 people died in the GULAG from 1934 to 1953, not
counting those who died in labor colonies or those who died shortly
after their release but which resulted from the harsh treatment in
the camps. Anne Applebaum notes that "both archives and memoirs
indicate that it was common practice in many camps to release
prisoners who were on the point of dying, thereby lowering camp
death statistics." The total population of the camps varied from
510,307 (in 1934) to 1,727,970 (in 1953)..

Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although the
political prisoner population was always significant. People could
be imprisoned in a Gulag camp for crimes such as unexcused absences
from work, petty theft, or anti-government jokes. About half of the
political prisoners were sent to Gulag prison camps without trial; official data suggest
that there were more than 2.6 million imprisonment sentences in
cases investigated by the secret police, 1921-1953. While the Gulag
was radically reduced in size following Stalin’s death in 1953, political prisoners
continued to exist in the Soviet Union right up to the Gorbachev era.

Modern usage and other terminology

Although Gulag originally was the name of a government
agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a noun, denoting:
the Soviet system of prison-based,
unfree labor — including specific
labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men,
women, and children.

Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet
repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once
called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the
transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the
destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and
unnecessary deaths.

Other authors, mostly in the West, use gulag as denoting
all the prisons and internment camps in Soviet history (1917–1991)
with the plural gulags. The term's contemporary usage is notably
unrelated to the USSR, such as in the expression "North Korea's Gulag".

The word Gulag was not often used in Russian — either
officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were the
camps ( ) and the zone ( ), usually singular — for
the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official
term, "corrective labor camp", was suggested for official politburo of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union use in the session of July 27, 1929.

History

Early Soviet period

GPU poster

On the eve of the 1917 revolution, 28,600 convicts were serving
sentences of hard labor. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 the
Russian penal system was taken over by the Bolsheviks. From 1918, camp-type detention facilities
were set up, as a reformed analogy of the earlier system of
penal labor (katorgas), operated in Siberia in Imperial Russia. The two main types were "Vechecka Special-purpose Camps" ( ) and forced labor camps ( ). They were
installed for various categories of people deemed dangerous for the
state: for common criminals, for prisoners of the Russian Civil War, for officials accused
of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, various political enemies
and dissidents, as well as former aristocrats, businessmen and
large land owners. These camps, however, were not on the same scale
as those in the Stalin era. In 1928 there were 30,000 prisoners in
camps, and the authorities were opposed to compelling them to work.
In 1927 the official in charge of prison administration wrote that:
"The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing ‘golden
sweat’ from them, the organization of production in places of
confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view
is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are
entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement.”

The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of
"corrective labor camps" ( ), the backbone of what is commonly
referred to as the "Gulag", was a secret decree of Sovnarkom of July 11, 1929, about the use of
penal labor that duplicated the
corresponding appendix to the minutes of Politburo meeting of June 27, 1929.

As an
all-Union institution
and a main administration with the OGPU (the
Soviet secret police), the GULAG was
officially established on April 25, 1930 as the "ULAG" by the OGPU
order 130/63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248
dated April 7, 1930, and was renamed into GULAG in
November.

Expansion under Stalin

In the early 1930s a drastic tightening of Soviet penal policy
caused a significant growth of the prison camp population. During
the period of the Great Purge (1937–38)
mass arrests caused another upsurge in inmate numbers. During these
years hundreds of thousands of individuals were arrested and
sentenced to long prison terms on the grounds of one of the
multiple passages of the notorious Article
58 of the Criminal Codes of the Union republics, which defined
punishment for various forms of "counterrevolutionary
activities."

Under NKVD Order № 00447
tens of thousands of GULAG inmates who were accused of "continuing
anti-Soviet activity in imprisonment" were executed in
1937-38.

The hypothesis that economic considerations were responsible for
mass arrests during the period of Stalinism has been refuted on the
grounds of former Soviet archives that have become accessible since
the 1990s, although some archival sources also tend to support an
economic hypothesis. In any case the development of the camp system
followed economic lines. The growth of the camp system coincided
with the peak of the Soviet industrialization campaign. Most of the
camps established to accommodate the masses of incoming prisoners
were assigned distinct economic tasks. These included the
exploitation of natural resources and the colonization of remote
areas as well as the realization of enormous infrastructural
facilities and industrial construction projects.

In 1931–32 the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the
camps; in 1935 — approximately 800,000 in camps and 300,000 in
colonies (annual averages), and in 1939 — about 1.3 millions in
camps and 350,000 in colonies. .

Approximately 300,000 Polish
prisoners of war were captured by the USSR during and after the
'Polish Defensive
War'. Almost all of the captured officers and a
large number of ordinary soldiers were then murdered (see Katyn massacre) or sent to GULAG. Of the 10,000-12,000
Poles sent to Kolyma in1940-1941, most
POWs, only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to
join the Polish Armed
Forces in the East. Out of Anders' 80,000 evacuees from
Soviet Union gathered in Great Britain only 310 volunteered to
return to Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947.

During the war, Gulag
populations declined sharply due to a steep rise in mortality in
1942–43. In the winter of 1941 a quarter of the Gulag's population
died of starvation. 516,841 prisoners
died in prison camps in 1941-43.

In 1943, the term katorga works
(каторжные работы) was reintroduced. They were initially intended
for Nazi
collaborators, but then other categories of political prisoners
(for example, members of deported peoples who
fled from exile) were also sentenced to "katorga works". Prisoners
sentenced to "katorga works" were sent to Gulag prison camps with
the most harsh regime and many of them perished.

GULAG after World War II

After World War II the number of inmates in prison camps and
colonies again rose sharply, reaching approximately 2.5 million
people by the early 1950s (about 1.7 million of whom were in
camps).

When the war ended in May 1945, as many as two million former
Russian citizens were forcefully
repatriated into the USSR.On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the
Yalta
Conference, the
United
States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the Soviet
Union. One interpretation of this agreement resulted in the
forcible repatriation of all Soviets. British and U.S. civilian
authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to
the Soviet
Union up to two million former residents of the Soviet
Union, including persons who had left Russia and established
different citizenship years before. The forced repatriation
operations took place from 1945-1947.

Often, one finds statements that Soviet POW on their return
to the Soviet Union were often treated as traitors (see Order No.270). According to some sources, over
1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers
imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag. However, that is
a confusion with two other types of camps. During and after World
War II freed PoWs went to special "filtration" camps. Of these, by
1944, more than 90 per cent were cleared, and about 8 per cent were
arrested or condemned to penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent
directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD.
Further, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for
repatriated Ostarbeiter, PoWs, and other displaced persons, which
processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, 80 per cent
civilians and 20 per cent of PoWs were freed, 5 per cent of
civilians, and 43 per cent of PoWs re-drafted, 10 per cent of
civilians and 22 per cent of PoWs were sent to labor battalions,
and 2 per cent of civilians and 15 per cent of the PoWs (226,127
out of 1,539,475 total) transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the
Gulag.

Yet the major reason for the post-war increase in the number of
prisoners was the tightening of legislation on property offences in
summer 1947 (at this time there was a famine in some parts of the
Soviet Union, claiming about 1 million lives), which resulted in
hundreds of thousands of convictions to lengthy prison terms,
sometimes on the basis of cases of petty theft or embezzlement. At
the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps
was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465 thousand were
political prisoners.

The state continued to maintain the extensive camp system for a
while after Stalin's death in March 1953, although the period saw
the grip of the camp authorities weaken and a number of conflicts
and uprisings occur (seeBitch
Wars; Kengir uprising; Vorkuta uprising).

The amnesty in March 1953 was limited to
non-political prisoners and for political prisoners sentenced to
not more than 5 years, therefore mostly those convicted for common
crimes were then freed. The release of political prisoners started
in 1954 and became widespread, and also coupled with mass rehabilitation, after Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of
Stalinism in his Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the
CPSU in February
1956.

By the end of the 1950s, virtually all "corrective labor camps"
were dissolved. Colonies, however, continued to exist. Officially
the GULAG was liquidated by the MVD
order 20 of January 25, 1960.(See also Foreign forced labor in
the Soviet Union)

Conditions

Gulag prisoner population statistics from 1934 to 1953

Living and working conditions in the camps varied significantly
across time and place, depending, among other things, on the impact
of broader events (World War II,
countrywide famines and
shortages, waves of terror, sudden influx or release of large
numbers of prisoners). However, to one degree or another, the large
majority of prisoners at most times faced meagre food rations,
inadequate clothing, overcrowding, poorly insulated housing; poor
hygiene, and inadequate health care. The overwhelming majority of
prisoners were compelled to perform harsh physical labor. In most
periods and economic branches, the degree of mechanization of work
processes was significantly lower than in the civilian industry:
tools were often primitive and machinery, if existent, short in
supply. Officially established work hours were in most periods
longer and days off were fewer than for civilian workers. Often
official work time regulations were extended by local camp
administrators.

Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and
liceridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These
prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance
to human beings. Lacking food . . . they collect orts [refuse] and,
according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.

In general, the central administrative bodies showed a discernible
interest in maintaining the labor force of prisoners in a condition
allowing the fulfillment of construction and production plans
handed down from above. Besides a wide array of punishments for
prisoners refusing to work (which, in practice, were sometimes
applied to prisoners that were too enfeebled to meet production quota), they instituted a number
of positive incentives intended to boost productivity. These
included monetary bonuses (since the early 1930s) and wage payments
(from 1950 onwards), cuts of sentences on an individual basis,
general early release schemes for norm fulfillment and
overfulfillment (until 1939, again in selected camps from 1946
onwards), preferential treatment and privileges for the most
productive workers (shock workers or
Stakhanovites in Soviet
parlance).

A distinctive incentive scheme that included both coercive and
motivational elements and was applied universally in all camps
consisted in standardized "nourishment scales": the size of the
inmates’ ration depended on the percentage of the work quota
delivered. Naftaly Frenkel is
credited for the introduction of this policy. While it was
effective in compelling many prisoners to make serious work
efforts, for many a prisoner it had the adverse effect,
accelerating the exhaustion and sometimes causing the death of
persons unable to fulfill high production quota.

Immediately after the German attack
on the Soviet Union in June 1941 the conditions in camps
worsened drastically: quotas were increased, rations cut, and
medical supplies came close to none, all of which led to a sharp
increase in mortality. The situation slowly improved in the final
period and after the end of the war.

Considering the overall conditions and their influence on inmates,
it is important to distinguish three major strata of Gulag inmates:

people unused to physical labour sentenced for various
political and religious reasons.

Mortality in GULAG camps in 1934-40 was 4-6 times higher than
average in Russia. The estimated total number of those who died in
imprisonment in 1930-1953 is 1.76 million, about half of which
occurred between 1941-1943 following the German invasion.

Geography

In the early days of Gulag, the locations for the camps were chosen
primarily for the ease of isolation of prisoners. Remote
monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new
camps. The site on the Solovetsky
Islands in the White
Sea is one of the earliest and also most noteworthy,
taking root soon after the Revolution in 1918. The colloquial name for the islands, "Solovki", entered the vernacular as a synonym
for the labor camp in general. It was being presented to the world
as an example of the new Soviet way of "re-education of class enemies" and reintegrating them through
labor into the Soviet society. Initially the inmates, the
significant part being Russian intelligentsia, enjoyed relative freedom
(within the natural confinement of the islands). Local newspapers
and magazines were edited and even some scientific research was
carried out (e.g., a local botanical garden was maintained, but
unfortunately later lost completely). Eventually it turned into an
ordinary Gulag camp; in fact some historians maintain that Solovki
was a pilot camp of this type. See Solovki
for more detail. Maxim Gorky visited the
camp in 1929 and published an apology of it.

With the
new emphasis on Gulag as the means of concentrating cheap labour,
new camps were then constructed throughout the Soviet sphere of
influence, wherever the economic task at hand dictated their
existence (or was designed specifically to avail itself of them,
such as Belomorkanal or Baikal Amur
Mainline), including facilities in big cities — parts of the
famous Moscow Metro and the Moscow State
University new campus were built by forced labor. Many
more projects during the rapid industrialization of the 1930s,
war-time and post-war periods were
fulfilled on the backs of convicts, and the activity of Gulag camps
spanned a wide cross-section of Soviet industry.

The
majority of Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas
of north-eastern Siberia (the best known clusters are Sevvostlag (The North-East Camps)
along Kolyma river and Norillag near Norilsk) and in the
south-eastern parts of the Soviet Union, mainly in the steppes of Kazakhstan (Luglag,
Steplag, Peschanlag). These were vast and
sparsely inhabited regions with no roads (in fact, the construction
of the roads themselves was assigned to the inmates of specialized
railroad camps) or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other
natural resources (such as timber). However, camps were generally spread
throughout the entire Soviet Union, including the European parts of Russia, Byelorussia, and Ukraine.There were also several camps located
outside of the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and
Mongolia, which were under the direct control of the
Gulag.

Not all camps were fortified; in fact some in Siberia were marked
only by posts. Escape was deterred by the harsh elements, as well
as tracking dogs that were assigned to each camp. While during the
1920s and 1930s native tribes often aided escapees, many of the
tribes were also victimized by escaped thieves. Tantalized by large
rewards as well, they began aiding authorities in the capture of
Gulag inmates. Camp guards were also given stern incentive to keep
their inmates in line at all costs; if a prisoner escaped under a
guard's watch, the guard would often be stripped of his uniform and
become a Gulag inmate himself. Further, if an escaping prisoner was
shot, guards could be fined amounts that were often equivalent to
one or two weeks wages.

In some cases, teams of inmates were dropped to a new territory
with a limited supply of resources and left to set up a new camp or
die. Sometimes it took several attempts before the next wave of
colonists could survive the elements.

The area along the Indigirka river
was known as the Gulag inside the Gulag. In 1926, the Oimiakon (Оймякон) village in this region registered the
record low temperature of −71.2 °C (−96 °F).

Throughout the period of Stalinism, at
least 476 separate camp administrations existed. Since many of
these existed only for short periods of time, the number of camp
administrations at any given point was lower. It peaked in the
early 1950s, when there were more than a hundred different camp
administrations across the Soviet Union. Most camp administrations
oversaw not just one, but several single camp units, some as many
as dozens or even hundreds. The infamous complexes were those at
Kolyma, Norilsk, and
Vorkuta, all in
arctic or subarctic regions. However, prisoner mortality in
Norilsk in most periods was actually lower than across the camp
system as a whole.

Special institutions

Special camps or zones for children (Gulag jargon: , underaged), for disabled (in
Spassk), and for mothers ( ) with
babies.

Sharashka ( , the
goofing-off place) were in fact secret research laboratories,
where the arrested and convicted scientists, some of them
prominent, were anonymously developing new technologies, and also
conducting basic research.

Influence

Culture

The Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European
history and affected millions of individuals. Its cultural impact
was enormous.

The Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian
thinking, and an important part of modern Russian folklore. Many songs by the
authors-performers known as the bards, most notably Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich, neither of whom ever
served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag and
glorified the life of "Zeks". Words and phrases which originated in
the labor camps became part of the Russian/Soviet vernacular in the
1960s and 1970s.

The memoirs of Alexander Dolgun,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Varlam Shalamov and Yevgenia Ginzburg, among others, became a
symbol of defiance in Soviet society. These writings, particularly
those of Solzhenitsyn, harshly chastised the Soviet people for
their tolerance and apathy regarding the Gulag, but at the same
time provided a testament to the courage and resolve of those who
were imprisoned.

Another cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union linked with the
Gulag was the forced migration of many artists and other people of
culture to Siberia. This resulted in a Renaissance of sorts in
places like Magadan, where, for
example, the quality of theatre production was comparable to
Moscow's.

Literature

Many eyewitness accounts of Gulag prisoners were published before
World War II.

Julius Margolin's book A
Travel to the Land Ze-Ka was finished in 1947, but it was
impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union at the
time, immediately after World War II.

Gustaw
Herling-Grudziński wrote A World Apart, which was
translated into English by Andrzej Ciolkosz and published with an
introduction by Bertrand Russell in
1951. By describing life in the gulag in a harrowing personal
account, it provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature
of the Soviet communist system.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
book The Gulag
Archipelago was not the first literary work about labour
camps. His previous book on the subject, "One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich", about a typical day of the GULAG inmate, was
originally published in the most prestigious Soviet monthly,
Novy Mir, (New World), in
November 1962, but was soon banned and withdrawn from all
libraries. It was the first work to demonstrate the Gulag as an
instrument of governmental repression against its own citizens on a
massive scale. The First
Circle, an account of three days in the lives of prisoners
in the Marfinosharashka or
special prison was submitted for publication to the Soviet
authorities shortly after One Day in the Life but was
rejected and later published abroad in 1968.

János Rózsás,
Hungarian writer, often referred to as the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn,
wrote a lot of books and articles on the issue of GULAG.

Karlo
Štajner, an Austrian communist active in the former Kingdom of
Yugoslavia and manager of Comintern Publishing House in
Moscow from 1932–39, was arrested one night and taken from his
Moscow home under accusation of anti-revolutionary
activities. He spent the following 20 years in camps from
Solovki to Norilsk. After USSR–Yugoslavian political normalization he was
re-tried and quickly found innocent. He left the Soviet
Union with his wife, who had been waiting for him for 20 years, in
1956 and spent the rest of his life in Zagreb, Croatia. He wrote an impressive book entitled
7000 days in Siberia.

Dancing Under the Red Star by Karl Tobien (ISBN 1-4000-7078-3) tells the story
of Margaret Werner, a young athletic girl who moves to Russia right
before the start of Stalin's terror. She faces many hardships, as
her father is taken away from her and imprisoned. Werner is the
only American woman who survived the Gulag to tell about it.

"Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag."
(ISBN 0-394-49497-0), of a member of the US Embassy, and "I Was
a Slave in Russia" (ISBN 0-815-95800-5), an American factory
owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of
their ordeal. Both were interned due to their American citizenship
for about 8 years circa 1946–55.

Eugenia Ginsburg, a journalist, wrote two famous books,
Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.

Colonization

Soviet
state documents show that among the goals of the GULAG was
colonization of sparsely populated remote areas. To this end, the
notion of "free settlement" was
introduced.

When well-behaved persons had served the majority of their terms,
they could be released for "free settlement" (вольное поселение,
volnoye poseleniye) outside the confinement of the camp.
They were known as "free settlers" (вольнопоселенцы,
volnoposelentsy, not to be confused with the term
ссыльнопоселенцы,ssyl'noposelentsy, "exile
settlers"). In addition, for persons who served full term, but
who were denied the free choice of place of residence, it was
recommended to assign them for "free settlement" and give them land
in the general vicinity of the place of confinement.

Life after term served

Persons who served a term in a camp or in a prison were restricted
from taking a wide range of jobs. Concealment of a previous
imprisonment was a triable offence. Persons who served terms as
"politicals" were nuisances for "First
Departments" ( , outlets of the secret
police at all enterprises and institutions), because former
"politicals" had to be monitored.

Lack of prosecution

It has
often been asked why there has been nothing along the lines of the
Nuremberg
Trials for those guilty of atrocities at the Gulag
camps. Two recent books, reviewed by Peter Rollberg in the
Moscow Times, cast some light on this. Tomasz
Kizny'sGulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration
Camps 1917-1990 details the history of the labour camps over
the years while Oleg Khlevniuk's The History of the Gulag: From
Collectivization to the Great Terror presents records of
confidential memos, official resolutions, individual testimonies
and tabulated statistics. Rollberg explains how both books
contribute to our understanding of why there were no post-Communism
trials. "The gulag had already killed tens of thousands of its own
most ardent killers. Again and again, yesterday's judges were
declared today's criminals, so that Soviet society never had to own
up to its millions of state-backed murders."

Gulag memorials

Both Moscow and St. Petersburg have memorials to the victims of the
Gulag made of boulders from the Solovki
camp — the first prison camp in the Gulag system. Moscow's memorial is
on Lubyanka
Square, the site of the headquarters of the NKVD.
People gather at these memorials every year on the Day
of Victims of the Repression (October 30).

References

According to Conquest, between 1939 and 1953, there was, in the
work camps, a 10% death rate per year, rising to 20% in 1938.
Robert Conquest in Victims of Stalinism: A Comment.
Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 49, No. 7 (Nov., 1997), pp. 1317-1319
states:"We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if
not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps'
alone, to which must be added 4-5 million going to Gulag
'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent
to, 'labour settlements'. However taken, these are surely 'high'
figures."

Getty, Rittersporn, Zemskov. Victims of the Soviet Penal System
in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival
Evidence. The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct.,
1993), pp. 1017-1049, see also
http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html